After working as a lawyer and newspaper reporter, Reeves became editor of the Canterbury Times in 1885 and of the Lyttelton Times (1889–91). He entered Parliament in 1887 and was named minister of education, justice, and labour in New Zealand’s first Liberal Party administration (1891–93), headed by John Ballance. In the next five years, Reeves sponsored 14 measures regulating factory and mine conditions, working hours, wages, and child and female labour. His Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act was the first legislation to provide for compulsory arbitration of labour-management disputes and influenced similar legislation in Australia. The act stimulated the growth of unions by limiting labour representation at the arbitration court to registered unions.

Ballance’s successor, Richard John Seddon, was less tolerant of Reeves’s advanced ideas on labour, and Reeves resigned in 1896 to become agent general in London. He wrote The Long White Cloud (1898), a history of New Zealand, and State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand (1902). After serving as high commissioner for New Zealand (1905–08) and director of the London School of Economics and Political Science (1908–19), he served as chairman of the board of New Zealand’s National Bank from 1917 to 1931.

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The chief Liberal industrial policy, however, formulated by William Pember Reeves, minister of labour from 1892 to 1896, was to encourage trade unions and to introduce, in the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1894, a conciliation and compulsory arbitration system intended to end industrial unrest and give the unions the means of protecting their members. The growth of unions was...

...It was the Liberal government in New Zealand that enacted the first effective measure. The Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1894 was drafted by that government’s most radical member, William Pember Reeves, a socialist among liberals. Addressing the problem of employers’ noncompliance with arbitration decisions, Reeves devised a system in which participation was voluntary for...

...subletting of government contracts for public works. He succeeded Ballance in 1893, inheriting a bill for woman suffrage, which was passed the same year, and also a talented cabinet, including William Pember Reeves and John McKenzie.